2 Minutes to Midnight
by DasCheesenborgir
Summary: "Blackened pride still burns inside this shell of bloody treason, so here's my gun for a barrel of fun, for the love of living death!"


**AN: Wasn't expecting I'd write another Fallout story, but I figured since Christmas already passed I'd write a… sort of New Year special kinda thing. Happened to be listening to Iron Maiden a bit lately and then this… thing popped into my head. **

**It's sort of a continuation to Cold Steel, but I decided to post it as a standalone story because it just felt so radically different from it as I was writing this. So, yeah. **

**I'm also aware that 2 Minutes to Midnight actually makes reference to the doomsday clock and not the actual clock, but I dun' give a damn. Deal with it. **

It was a cold and bitter night in the Mojave Desert. Bones laid undisturbed, as bleached and cracked as the earth they rested on, untouched by even the vultures tonight due to the air's sudden and unnatural coldness. Freshly-fallen corpses shriveled, their flesh drying and pulling taut against the brittle skeletons that held them. The roads were empty, devoid of patrols, only the occasional hungry gecko skittering across the ravaged pavement in search of anything that would sate their appetite.

Tonight, there was no gunfire echoing in the distance. There would be no midnight slave raids, no ambushes on unwitting patrols, no drums of war beating in the Legion camps on bloodied shores that no longer seemed so distant. The stars themselves seemed to dance with excitement, mingling with the blinding rays of light that shone up from New Vegas, the sole beacon in the Mojave burning brighter than ever before.

For tonight was New Year's Eve.

Even from the empty ramparts of Camp McCarran, one could hear the cries of jolly drunkards and the jingling of festive music drifting over New Vegas' high walls.

The monorail was still, practically all of the base personnel having had already rushed over to New Vegas long before. Only a small handful remained in the airport's main building, the inside buzzing with lively chatter and music. The main lobby lights had finally been repaired for the occasion, and they cast a warm, comfortable glow through the complex's large windows.

The guard posts were vacant, everyone having had gathered inside for shelter against the cold. For the moment, everything in the Mojave seemed alright.

The edges of the world seemed to bend and distort around the circumference of the gauss rifle's scope as a Brotherhood paladin eased it back and forth along the length of McCarran airfield's main building. The red dot in the centre hovered over the heads of officers, soldiers, even the odd civilian as he observed the scene with a strange sense of curiosity nagging in a void of emptiness.

It was boggling how with all the things that perished in searing nuclear fire, how many other things had survived from the Old World. Even in such an inhospitable, radioactive wasteland, he was always surprised at how many people clung to Old World traditions. He had seen filthy savages and raving lunatics alike pausing for brief moments to celebrate holidays, the most jaded of killers whispering prayers to their gods before he had executed them, but never something on this magnitude.

For the past week, most of the major settlements he had passed were alight with joy, some of them literally. He, of course, had not dared to take the risk of revealing his presence and entering them, but he could hear the radios blaring with music, drowned out by the drunken voices of men and women without a care in the world. He had dismissed them as being incredibly foolish for letting their guard down so easily, but he had noticed that even the Legion camps across the river had gone silent, and he did not see a single roving band of raiders along the highway either.

Distorted by the helmet he wore, his breathing came out as softly and raspy as the gentle breeze that tickled the hardened steel plates of his armor.

It was mind boggling how just one, short time of the year was enough to stomp out the fires of hate in so many. Why did people do this? The entire region was at war, there were still bloodthirsty predators that stalked the night… and yet people partied and drank and laughed as they had never before. Why did they continue to cling to fragments of the past in such a bleak and unforgiving present?

His muscles tightened and his trigger began to tingle with anticipation as the Pip-Boy on his left arm beeped once, cutting off his train of thought. For the briefest of moments, he shifted his gaze from the sights of his rifle over to the small device's screen, emanating a soft, almost sickening green light.

_11:55. Five minutes. _

He reached back with his left into his bag, keeping the gauss rifle's wooden stock pressed firmly against his right shoulder. Holiday or not, he would complete the goal he had set tonight. If anything, it only made his job even easier.

He winced as the servo motors in the armor creaked in protest.

_Fucking tin can, _he cursed. No matter how hard he tried to maintain it, with all the resources at his disposal and even a handful of spare parts, it was just never enough for the damnable suit of power armor. He grimaced at the prospect of having to find someone else to repair it, but there wasn't much else choice. He supposed he could try checking back at Hidden Valley for better equipment, but he had already picked the whole place clean when he didn't find any of his comrades there following the incident at HELIOS. There really hadn't been much there.

Rage bubbled beneath the steel skin of his armor at the mere thought of HELIOS, reminding him why he was where he was tonight.

He returned his thoughts to his current task, setting down four more microfusion cells on the concrete next to him. If all went well tonight, he wouldn't need to waste any more than that.

Another beep. He checked the time on the Pip-Boy again, squinting beneath the dusty visor of his helmet to make out the numbers.

_11:57. Three more minutes. _

The next minute passed agonizingly slowly as he steeled himself for the pandemonium that would soon ensue the camp, steadying his sights over the front exits. When a man and a woman, military personnel from the looks of their drab, dusty brown uniforms snuck out of one of the doors, he nearly shot them down on the spot.

Discipline took over and stayed his finger as the dot in the center of his rifle scope shifted over their domed helmets. Grunts. Not worth the ammo, and definitely not worth tipping off the rest of the base before the fireworks went off.

Another beep.

_Two minutes. _

With little else to do, he observed the two's antics with detached interest, dispassionately calculating how long it would take for him to reload before the other soldier would start screaming when their friend's steaming innards splattered onto their uniform. He didn't plan on shooting them anyways, but it helped pass the time.

He tensed as the music from inside the building rose to a crescendo, the static, garbled and distorted voice of Frank Sinatra drifting out of the ajar door the two troopers stood by. The woman had whipped around in surprise at the sudden noise, and her comrade, seemingly invigorated by a sudden rush of either courage or foolishness took the opportunity to spin her around and embrace her in a loving kiss.

He blinked, a sudden rush of… something filling him as his finger eased off of the trigger. He stared through the scope as the man released the woman, and his lips moved, speaking to her. He did not need to hear the words, for he had seen people speak them enough before.

_Happy New Year. _

Another beep.

_One minute left. _

His thoughts began to slide uncontrollably back to the mere concept of celebration. "Happy" New Year? What was so damn 'happy' in a shitsack of a wasteland that was the New World? The year would certainly be new, but nothing else would be, that was for sure. This wasn't the Old World anymore, this was literally Hell on Earth. There was no time for frivolities such as those back then, and it was a fool's gamble to believe there was or ever would be again.

He watched the pair of troopers, grinning like idiots, exchange a few words and one last kiss before they stepped back into the airport lobby. In just a few seconds, that moment of happiness they just shared would mean absolutely nothing. Everything that happened that night, every moment of elation, relief, every drink shared with a friend, every kiss shared with a lover would amount to abso-fucking-lutely nothing.

Twenty seconds left.

That was what was wrong with people. Too lazy. Too carefree. Too damn idealistic. They clung to Old World memories in a New World where such things would die away in a heartbeat.

Peace? Prosperity? None of that would exist again. None of it would last. People couldn't be trusted anymore, especially with something as powerful as technology.

Ten seconds.

The worst he had seen were those Followers of the Apocalypse idiots. They took all of their knowledge, technology, _everything_ and handed it out like it was fucking candy to filthy savages and squatters that would either destroy it with their ignorance or abuse it.

Nine.

There were even those in the Brotherhood itself that seemed to lack the backbone required to get anything done these days.

Eight.

Veronica had always been one of the worst offenders in that regard.

Seven.

He spared only a brief thought to what had happened to her following HELIOS before turning back to the task at hand.

Six.

And then of course, there was the NCR. The Republic was fat, greedy, gorging themselves on the fruits of the Old World, stumbling over themselves as they reached for more and ruined priceless pieces of technology in their bumbling incompetence and ignorance.

Five.

He took a brief moment to take stock of his inventory, brushing aside such thoughts that would only serve to distract him from his objective.

Four.

There was a pretty good chance he could nab every single person on the base with what he had, but he only needed one man dead.

Three.

Two.

He took a deep breath, bracing the stock of his rifle against his shoulder a-

One.

For that moment, the stars themselves seemed to have been blotted out, a cascade of fireworks from New Vegas celebrating the coming of New Year's, spears of coloured fire lancing into the night sky and blanketing it in a shower of burning magnesium.

For the paladin at McCarran, it was more like an illusion that was brutally shattered aby a monstrous roar that shook the sky, a great pillar of nuclear flame rising from the airport complex as it was torn asunder. The building rumbled with a malevolent chuckle as slabs of concrete and stone sailed into the sky and crashed back into the earth. High-pitched shrieks accompanied the bending and warping of makeshift walls in the incinerating fire, buckling and snapping as chunks of rubble smashed into them.

The glass doors at the front exploded outwards in a shower of shattered glass and broken bodies, base personnel that were fortunate enough to escape the hellish maw of the expanding mushroom cloud blasted off of their feet and out into the unforgiving, cold night.

A moment of deathly silence followed, a rainbow of glittering light hanging in the sky above New Vegas as the Reaper's shadow did the same over McCarran, even the sound of his own breathing and his own heart pumping no longer audible to the paladin as a void of emptiness swallowed his emotions and thoughts. He caught a glimpse of an olive-coloured beret sitting on a uniformed man's head off to the side of his scope. _Target sighted. _

His finger squeezed the trigger of his rifle, an electromagnetically-propelled bullet lashing into the air like a bolt of lightning, the shrieks and bellows of pain from a man torn asunder following like thunder.

He yanked out the spent microfusion cell and slammed another into its place, taking a brief few moments to realign his sights on another target. He did not linger upon the face of the soldier the red dot hovered on long enough to recognize it as the woman he had noticed earlier, tears streaming down her cheeks as she cradled her dead lover in her arms. The rifle thundered out a roar of triumph as its next bullet lashed out of the barrel in a blaze of azure light and sawed through her stomach, rending her into two, tattered, bleeding chunks of meat.

A new year had arrived, and war eagerly greeted it in an avalanche of blood and suffering, as it had many times before, and would continue to do so many more times. For with all of the ideals, technology, philosophies, people, and traditions that had withered and burned in atomic fire, war had endured and rode into the New World in a blaze of bloody glory.

And as the paladin reloaded and re-sighted once more, he gladly let it embrace him and wash away his thoughts in an inferno of anger and retribution. Such was the nature of war. Such had always been the nature of war, and such will always be the nature of war.

Because war never changes.


End file.
